Friday, July 31, 2009

Capricious Space is proud to present FROM BLUE TO BLUE, a selection of images extracted from 10 years of personal work by Martien Mulder. With a focus on landscape and portraiture, this particular edit is based on the monochromatic quality of each photograph. The primary color in every image determines its place in the space. Even though the images have their own individual meaning on the level of representation, they are sorted by their formal values. Mulder treats them as colors in a color scheme while designing within the graphic space: whether it is the pages of a book, or a gallery. Her installations are site specific.

Dutch-born Martien Mulder discovered her love for photography as a teenager. Her first pictures date from her high school years, when friends would pose willingly in her homemade studio. After her art history studies, with a major in contemporary photography, she decided to take her own pictures more seriously. By composing handmade books of her photographs, she established a visual language that connected to the magazine world. She started traveling the world, wherever assignments would lead her, and created personal work at the same time. Mulder has always been interested in the relationship between people and their environment.

She currently lives in New York and her pictures have appeared in magazines such as Purple, 10 Magazine, French Vogue and Fantastic Man. She has had exhibitions staged in New York, Amsterdam and Tokyo. Her book, also titled “From Blue to Blue” will be available for purchase.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

I think the first time I came across Hiroyo Kaneko's photography was through Shane Lavalette's Issue 01 of the Lay Flat project. Her "Sentimental Education" series brought me the calmness and trust that I yearn for within family, skin, and touch. I remember going to Japan with my mother when I was 17, for a touristy week trip with a busload of strangers and we refused going to the hot-springs because we never grew up comfortable with our own skin. Hiroyo's photography connects me back to my own memories with emotions and scenes that have far been pushed to the back of my consciousness.

Nymphoto: Tell us a little about yourself?

Hiroyo Kaneko: I was born in Aomori city, a northernmost area of the main island of Japan. As my family moved every few years because of my father's occupation, I spent my childhood in several different places, both the countryside and in the cities.

Experiencing thrills, loneliness and some troubles, I gained a kind of objective or detached view to look at things, people and myself, which has influenced my work and life.

I studied French Literature at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and after working in an advertising office for a couple of years, I went to London to study photography. I attended an art school and got a diploma in photography, then went back to Tokyo, started working as a freelance photographer and writer for culture and photography magazines. At the same time, I kept working on my own photo projects. This was from mid-1990s to the turn of the 21st century.

The more chances to participate in exhibitions, the more I became interested in focusing on art photography for myself. I decided to go to the United States to pursue photography further. I went to the graduate program at San Francisco Art Institute 2003 to 2005. Since then I have been living in San Francisco.

HK: My father use to take family snapshots a lot when I was a child. I remember that we always enjoyed looking at the pictures he took. He had a manual Pentax SLR, which he gave me later.

When I was in the college, I took some classes about visual arts and film, because the period that I was studying within French Literature was early to mid 20th century, a time when all the cultural movements interacted with each other. I was interested in the relationship between writers, visual artists and filmmakers, such as Andre Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Luis Bunuel.

I was also into French New Wave films, especially Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut as well as Japanese film makers, like Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Seijun Suzuki. All those visual experiences got me involved in a filmmaking circle and made a few 8mm films with my peers. However, after we graduated it became difficult to get together to continue the activity, and then I gradually shifted to photography which I could do on my own.

HK: I get inspiration when something I see at present corresponds with my memories in my head, including the memories of other artists' work: novels, movies, paintings and photographs.

I am influenced by painting a lot, especially by French impressionists like Manet and Cezanne (also Renoir and Bonnard too). They inspire me with how I should deal with the natural light and color that are reflected from the subjects. For the way of seeing the relationship between people and family, I also learn a lot from movies by directors such as Mikiko Naruse, Yasujiro Ozu, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Manoel de Oliveira, as well as others.

HK: From my personal experiences, relationships, concerns, which have been piled up in my mind and have kept coming back to my conscious. I try to find a way to sublime those issues into art even though they are not necessarily expressed directly.

For example, the idea of "Sentimental Education" came from my experience in the US. For the first couple of years after I moved here, I had severe difficulty communicating with others. This didn't mean that the people in the US are more severe than people in Japan. I guess that any community in contemporary society should be same more or less, even within families. But for me, it was more obvious here because I was a stranger, had a language barrier, and faced cultural differences, etc. However, I also became more grateful and found it precious when I saw mutual respect or understanding among people. Thus, I got interested in seeing how our ordinary daily experiences (rituals) affect the ways we communicate with each other and how we interact emotionally with each other.

Rather than showing negative aspects of this , I wanted to show something more neutral and fundamental. Then I came up with the idea of photographing people in bathhouses in Japan which seemed to me an ideal setting for my purpose.

The cherry blossom pictures, "Picnic," stem from a similar idea. I photographed them in Aomori where I was born and spent my childhood. I was interested in reviewing and recreating my early experience which, I guess, helped to create my emotional makeup.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Issue 4 of the anticipated The Exposure Project book is finally available for purchase! The book is offered in both regular and special editions. We're proud to have our own, Rona Chang, participate in this project with a great roster of artists.

Friday, July 24, 2009

The images from Lillian Birnbaum's 2008 book, Transition are on currently on view at Andrea Meislin Gallery in NYC. The series, shot over 5 years, depicts girls in the pivotal period between childhood and womanhood.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

This week we bring you a photographer with a diverse array of projects. Naomi Harrisis a documentary photographer as well as an editorial photographer. She has published a book titled, America Swings, with Taschen.

I first came across Naomi's work via a press release by Taschen about her book release. Intrigued with her series, America Swings, I felt it was necessary for viewers to see a selection of her editorial and documentary projects with her voice.

Naomi Harris: I am the youngest child born to Jerry and Diane Harris in Toronto, May 1973. Although I got my green card in November 2006, I am devout Canadian, and you can see that by opening my fridge and seeing the forbidden contraband Bicks pickles I smuggle from north of the border. That and the fact that I love camping, SCTV and Gordon Lightfoot.

I wish I could have a cat but I travel too much. I don’t even have a house plant because that would die. I did have a rescue turtle for about a year but that was more out of guilt. I found him abandoned by my super in my lobby last winter but after a year I too abandoned him, but in the safety of a Petco.

I’m a girl not a woman. You know the type: never wears makeup, loves jeans and trainers, has a tendency to be vulgar and doesn’t eat like a bird. Food is my passion. And I don’t mean cooking, just the consuming part.

NH: I wanted to be a doctor, but seeing as I flunked math I knew that this wasn’t the path to take. I decided to work on a portfolio to apply to art school as that had been the one constant in my life and I truly loved creating art. I was accepted to York University in Toronto and lived at home for the 4 years I studied my bachelor of Fine Arts. It wasn’t until I moved to New York at age 24 that I left home for the first time.

In university my major was printmaking but so much of my work was photo-based and I would appropriate other people’s photographs. I decided in my third year to take a basic photo class so I could make my own photos to use in my printmaking. On a trip to Europe that summer l I brought my camera along and upon seeing my contact sheets I decided that this was what turned me on. And the fact that I couldn’t really see myself making a career out of printmaking. I applied to the International Center of Photography for their Documentary program, and surprisingly I was accepted.

NH: I'm attracted to real people and the beauty in the everyday mundane. I tend to want to photograph people and as a curious individual who loves to ask nosey and personal questions I can get away with it if I'm actually photographing that person. Photography gives me the in to worlds I know nothing about and am not privy to. I'm lured in by the obscure and those that others don't find interesting at first glance. These are the people who I find most fascinating and seek inspiration from. I adore seeing what goes on behind closed doors and to be able to get access to really tough situations.

NH: My photography is certainly separate from my day-to-day life. I admire photographers who are able to shoot themselves and make dynamic pictures, if I was to turn the camera on myself I think people would get bored pretty quickly at seeing yet another photo of me watching Golden Girl reruns for the umpteenth time.

Instead I photograph things I want to learn more about and hopefully no one else has already explored. Like when I moved into the Haddon Hall Hotel in Miami Beach it was because when growing up I had a relationship with only my paternal grandmother and that was strained as she was a depressive woman. These last remaining seniors of Miami Beach became my surrogate grandparents and I their granddaughter.

My America Swings project came about while living in Miami. I used to go to the nude beach but didn’t know at first that a good proportion of these nudists were also swingers. One Sunday night, shortly before I moved away from Miami in 2002, I was invited by a fellow beach goer to be his “date” and go to a swing club (single men are not allowed to attend). He knew I was a photographer and thought I would find the scene interesting. It was in a strip mall in a very commercial part of town. Non-descript, downright seedy from the outside, but inside there was a dance floor and a large buffet complete with a chef in white with a big chef’s hat carving roast beef and serving scalloped potatoes. We stuffed ourselves and then 20 minutes later went to the back room where all the sex was going on. You were not permitted to enter the back dressed; you had to change into a towel. As a nudist I was fine with that, as a young lady I felt like a piece of sirloin.

We went in the group sex room, which was more or less a row of about six mismatched beds pushed together. This was the first time I had ever seen anyone having sex in person. We stayed and watched for a couple of hours but neither of us did anything. That was the understanding; I was his guest but he had no expectations of me whatsoever. When we left I knew I had to start photographing this, because no one would believe me when I told stories of what I’d seen, like the woman at 3:00 in the morning picking food from the breakfast buffet stark naked but for heels. And I wasn’t aware of anyone who had really photographed this before.

NP: Explain why you chose to make the America Swings section of your website password-protected.NH: It was more out of necessity than choice. I had been assigned a couple of jobs where at the last minute I was pulled off it when the powers that be got skiddish of the fact that I shoot nudity. I always thought it would be wise to show this work because a: doesn’t this show my ability to get into any situation and make people comfortable, and b: because I’m darn proud of all my hard work.

In the end I guess it is wiser to not be offensive and allow people to contact me for the password. Incidentally, if anyone reading this wants to look at this section of the website I’ll give you a hint. The password begins with the letter L, ends with the letter E and spells IFESTYL in the middle. It’s also another word used to describe swinging.

NH: Such a time of change! Was planning on moving to LA in the fall but just found out that I’m teaching a class at ICP in the fall (nude photography, of course) which I’m really excited about. I’ve been wanting to teach for a long time, so instead I’m sticking around NY for a little longer. Relocating to a quieter neighborhood though so purging for the move has been all encompassing.

I would love to get the Haddon Hall work published as I started the project 10 years ago in December 1999. It’s a project I hold very dear to me but put on hold during the 6 years it took to shoot and produce the swingers book.

I’m currently trying to make my first documentary film. I still love photography but often feel we are missing out by not hearing the conversations going on in these photos.

I’m also working on a new photo project called EUSA where I’m photographing American themed places in Europe and European themed places in America. I like how we interpret the others culture in such a kitschy manner. Like so many Europeans conjure thoughts of Cowboys and Indians when they think of America and we picture all Europeans in lederhosen carrying beer steins and eating brauts. The photos are more about the landscape of these places which is a big change for me.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Concept: Is your photographic vision stuck in black and white? Awaken your photography and tell stories in vivid details using the language of color. In this class we will examine the expressive possibilities of color photography. Through artist presentations, field trips and interactive exercises we will explore the emotions and energy associated with color as we push the boundaries of your expression. We will explore the magnificent natural areas surrounding Anderson Ranch and work in classroom to review portfolios and the photographic products of our photo journeys.

Amy Stein is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. In 2007, she was named one of the top 15 emerging photographers in the world by American Photo and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. A monograph of Domesticated won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival. Amy teaches photography at Parsons The New School for Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and Pool Gallery in Berlin. www.amysteinphoto.com

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

3rd Ward, Williamsburg's member-based design center for creative professionals, just announced an Open Call for photography. This competition is an international search for the best new work from emerging photographers.

Winning photographers will be featured in a group exhibit with one first place award of $500 and a Third Ward Green Bike. Everyone who's selected will also written up in their quarterly publication, get a one-month basic membership with access to their four photo studios and gain citywide exposure through press about the event.

Exhibition (through August 16, 2009)If I think of you as loud as I can, can you hear me?works by Andrea Nehring & Martina WoerzSiegerlandmuseumOranienstraße 957072 Siegen, GermanyHours Tue-Sun 10:00 am to 5:00 pm (free admission)- through August 16, 2009

Saturday, July 18, 2009

This year our summer group show, Summer Reading, is united around the wonderful world of words. Jen Bekman Gallery will be showing paintings, drawings and photographs from a talented lot, some of whom you already know from their 20x200 editions.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Céline Clanet is one of the winners of 2008's Photolucida's Critical Mass Book Award. Her photographic work of the European Artic first introduced me to this rural part of the world. The series, "Maze" contains sincere photographs of the people, the landscape, and the emotions of the Artic. I cannot wait until Céline's book releases from Photolucida and we're so glad to have her participate in our Conversations series.

Nymphoto: Tell us a little about yourself?

Céline Clanet: I was born in ‘77 and raised in the French Alps until I was 18. I spent my childhood playing with dogs, breeding several armies of snails, ballet dancing, fighting with my older brother, and strolling endlessly in the mountain behind our house.

After some time spent in London and Arles - where I studied at the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie - I have now been living in Paris for over 10 years with my man and son.I share my time between photography, graphic design, planning the next trip to somewhere far, trying to play music, and regularly being forced to watch hours of Peppa Pig and the UEFA Champions League.

CC: I was about 14, and I was living with my grandmother during some painful teenage years. I was spending much time in her messy attic where there were remains of an old (very old!) photo lab, and I started to experiment B&W printing up there. By some miracle, I managed to process films and prints, and loved doing it.

One day that I was digging about up there, I discovered a little suitcase that happens to be a treasure: the oldest family pictures were in it, hundreds of them. My grandmother had been searching for it for many years, and was deeply moved and grateful to see it again. I felt like Wonder Woman (attic & suitcases section).

We spent many hours looking through the photographs together. I realized that this suitcase was our family memory indeed that those events and dead people only existed inside it and nowhere else.

Photography fascinated me. It could make things last forever and make dead people talk again. It made me understand that your life only exists because you remember it. "Each time you forget, you recall death" once wrote Maurice Blanchot... That definitely hooked the disturbed teenager in me.

The relationship between photography, identity, death and memory is something that never left my thoughts since then. It tints all my works, even if it's in a very light color sometimes.

For instance, I first fell in love with Lapland when I was 8 and watched a Japanese anime adaption of "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson" on French television. I was already very much into Polar world, but Lapland never left my mind since that anime. The landscapes and animals looked so great. Far and different, yet on my own continent. And the goose could talk!

CC: I use the photographic medium mostly as a tool and pretext to experience the world. I probably wouldn't have spent months in the Arctic if it weren’t to make pictures.If I have fun, learn something from the pictures made, record something important, and I can create beauty in it, I go for the project. (It’s a plus when people like my work and think it's interesting. I become the happiest woman on Earth.)

The fading and fragile Sami land and community are one of the only Artic indigenous people of continental Europe and it became my obsession years ago. Most Europeans don’t even have a clue about their neighbors to the north. At that time, I was not very keen on the photography I had seen about Lapland so far. The pictures focused on costumes and traditions. Cliché photographs of the “exotic” traditions make boring pictures, wherever they are taken in the world. I wanted to show more than that.

It took me almost a couple of years to prepare my Máze project. I had already been traveling in Lapland before, but as I wanted to stay several months to start a photo project decently, it needed tough organization. I passed my driving license, bought a car, started Norwegian lessons, met ethnologists, studied Sami history more, searched for funding, spent all my money in boots and down clothes, wrote to many Sami people, and eventually found a place to stay up there, in Máze.

Then in spring 2005 I drove my car from Paris to Máze and stayed 3 months up there as a first journey.

Lucky me, I hit upon the most amazing place in whole European Arctic. Máze is beautiful, precious, unique, wild, and full of amazing people and crazy reindeer herders. Máze has a very peculiar and moving history, as it was saved from the waters of a Norwegian dam project some years ago. People's relationships with territory, animals and time is very peculiar there, and I focused pretty much on that.

Being a photographer in this village was like being a starving rabbit in a giant carrot field.Since that first trip, I try to travel there once a year. And became a snowmobile addict.

CC: I am just back from a trip in Máze, and I'm gathering the last pictures and texts for the Critical Mass book, that will hopefully be out later in 2009. I'm preparing my first show in US, planned early 2010.

I still work on another Arctic series that explores Lapland landscape, "Sápmi". I have driven thousand of kilometers in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Lapland: next step will be Russian Lapland, where I have never been yet.

I've also been working since several months on a series about my home area and family in the Alps.

AND, I am searching for the great Gallery that will make me the wealthy artist I always wanted to be. Then I could buy this Ski-Doo snowmobile of my dreams and break my last speed record on Máze river, yeah!

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Since April of 2002, Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu has been documenting the physical and mental boundaries of young Puerto Rican women and their families living on 103rd Street in Spanish Harlem. Her series, Life on the Block discusses how the women of these families provide an inner compass to explore the challenges of life and their quest for empowerment as well as their desire and inability to brake a cycle of mere survival.

There is a hardness that characterizes these streets, and innocence dies young. This community has a high rate of unemployment-three times the New York City average. The family income is based on public assistance and often supplemented by the underground economy of the street; the sale of drugs and other illegal activities that commonly lead to detention, prison, and death.

Fathers and brothers are often absent from the family unit. Girls reaffirm their existence through maternity and drop out of high school to become mothers at an early age. These strong young women of the block represent the potential elements of change in this society. Women are the pillars of the community. These women often choose to be somebody in their block rather than nobody in a promising new horizon. To break that lifestyle is almost a betrayal to their roots and their people. Many families in these communities live under the same values and circumstances, a pattern of existence they jokingly call "the ghetto life."

This series is an intense look at their roles as women in a machista culture, as latinas in a white society, and as mothers of the upcoming American generations.

Aperture, Pratt, and the Strand Book Store are pleased to announce the winners of the Eye on the Strand photography contest, which kicked off last fall and concluded March 31, 2009. The winners were chosen by a prestigious panel of judges from over 500 submissions featuring unique and creative photo representations of the Strand Book Store. The Grand Prize Winner will get to have lunch at New York City’s famous Balthazar Restaurant with world-renowned photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and receive a collection of Aperture books, among other prizes.

The work of the grand prize, second and third place winners and twenty finalists will be featured in a special exhibition to open at the Pratt Institute CCPS Gallery on July 16, 2009. An opening reception will take place Wednesday, July 15 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. To read about contest details, including prizes awarded, and to view the winning images, please visit The Strand’s online photography gallery at www.eyeonthestrand.com.

Grand Prize Photo Winner: Josh Robinson/“Strand Shadows”A native of St. Louis, Mo., Josh is currently a graduate student in NYU’s Graphic Communications Management and Technology program. Previously, he was a two-time Emmy Award winning television news producer, and most recently a features producer for AOL. He lives in Manhattan with his wife Claire.

Second Place Photo: Cary Conover/“Upside Down”A freelance photographer based in New York City, Cary is a regular contributor to The Village Voice and The New York Times, among other publications. Cary’s black and white documentary street photography celebrates New York City. A native of Wichita, Kansas, Cary lives on the Lower East Side with his wife, Yvonne.

Third Place Photo and Viewers’ Choice Winner: Manjari Sharma/”Strand, The dreamer’s land”A native of Mumbai, India, Manjari graduated from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 2004, and is currently a freelance photographer living in New York City. In India, she photographed for The Times Of India and Better Photograph. In the U.S., her clients include AOL, American baby and Penguin Books. Manjari received eight honorable mentions in the IPA Lucie Awards 2008.

Please join us at Harlem Studio Fellowship for the opening of a double solo exhibition of artists-in-residence, Lovisa Ringborg and Elena Ascari. Co-curated by HSF Chief Curator, Raffaele Bedarida with newly appointed Junior Curator, Teresa Meucci, the show presents works achieved by the two artists during their stay in New York (May-July-2009).

Swedish artist Lovisa Ringborg exhibits at HSF two interrelated works. A photograph, Insomnia is the visual and conceptual counterpart of an environmental piece, If Your Secret Was an Animal What Animal Would It Be, which consists of four photographs and a mirror text. More than doing photographs, Ringborg literally works with photography: her initial photographic shots, used as “raw material” (the artist’s words), are digitally altered and combined into carefully composed and theatrically staged images. As with Caravaggio (a rough mattress hardly visible under classical draperies), the fictionality of the represented scene is revealed in her work, and the masquerade in the artist’s studio emerges interfering with the subject matter. Subtle visual inconsistencies insinuate unreliability in the faux staged-photographs and add surreal echoes to their content. But there is no attempt on shocking effects: no juxtaposition of evidently incongruous images and meanings. If the sleep of Goya’s reason produced monsters, the inoffensive stuffed animals that Ringborg photographed at the Museum of Natural History, are turned into the elementary vocabulary of a potentially monstrous language. A language from which narrative is removed and humans, beasts, and objects are kept frozen on the threshold between familiar anxieties and uncanny premonitions. RB

ELENA ASCARICells

The series of paintings presented by Italian artist Elena Ascari starts a new phase in her visual research. Ascari’s previous canvases portrayed the reflecting world of the malls’ escalators through a photorealist technique. The shiny world of glasses and mirrors was turned into a no-less-kitschy surface of gummy paint. The effect was one of complex visual fragmentation: repetitions, reflections, and distortions of the same figures resulted in an optical multiplication that could be read as an open sequence, a deconstructed story. With Cells, Ascari does a step further. Focused on the refracting skin of design objects, these new reflections destroy any perceptive continuity. An ordinary experience given by the popularization and domestication of Deconstructivist architecture is translated into a trope: close-up views become miniaturized oneiric visions. In the resulting kaleidoscope, humans as well as any other recognizable thing are fugacious and isolated apparitions. The story no longer exists, connections are lost. The aesthetic of very small reflective surfaces become, with Cells, a metaphor for the connective isolation of the i-phone era. RB

An ongoing photo and video portrait exhibition at Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces, shows the French actress and jury leader of the 62nd Cannes film festival caught on film by about 100 leading international photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller, Wen Fang and Helmut Newton.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Rania Nafal, a graduate of NYU & Stanford, recently opened a niche store in an industrial aera of Beirut. The shop serves tea & sells magazines & art books with works by Nan Goldin, Peter Beard and others. Read more about this store in the Daily Star Lebanon, in an article written by Stephen Dockery, by clicking here.

Paper Cup is located in the Hagopian building on Pharaoh Street in Mar Mikhael, Beirut.

Friday, July 10, 2009

NOORDERLICHT PHOTOGALLERYSummer of Love11 July through 23 AugustOpening Friday 10 July, at 5:00 in the Noorderlicht Photogallery. Yevgeny Kondakov will be present.

This summer the Noorderlicht Photogallery brings you Summer of Love, a blistering exhibition in which four photographers take up sexual freedom and illusions.

Emmanuel Guillaud (France, b. 1970) roamed through Tokyo at night. Until the Sun Rises is his new installation about loneliness, about men who wander through parking lots and and school yards: public places which by night change into a temporary ghetto. They hope for chance encounters, are ‘in search of a kick without obligations’, or actually of intimacy… When the sun comes up they leave again, preferring to forget what has happened. The installation Until the Sun Rises is being shown for the first time by Noorderlicht.

Katharina Hesse (Germany, b. 1966) in Human Negotiations, gives us a different picture of the prostitution industry in Bangkok, Thailand. She followed a number of women and interviewed them extensively about their lives and their background, their choices and their motives. It appeared very much the question whether our Western image – women as powerless victims of the Eastern sex industry – can be maintained. Hesse dares to oppose the stereotype of sexual slavery with an intimate, and at the very least ambiguous picture of ordinary women who make a better life possible for themselves and their children by selling dreams.

Yevgeny Kondakov (Russia, b. 1961) asked himself the question: what happens when the most repressed country in the world is exposed to mass-market consumerism and a government that does not care what ordinary people do? In Russian Sexual Revolution he demonstrates that not only an economic and political revolution took place in the former Soviet Union, but also a sexual revolution: in all its wildness, its strangeness, its vulgarity, and its innocence.

Amy Touchette (USA, b. 1970), in The World Famous *BOB*, documents the life of a ‘burlesque dancer’ in New York. ‘Bob’, the male drag queen whose identity she assumes, lived an eccentric but destructive life in San Francisco. Awakening from the nightmare that her existence was, she gave herself a second chance in New York. There she could finally indulge in her fantasy: being a star.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Laura Heyman is an amazing educator, photographer, artist and curator and I was so privileged to have spent fours years as her student at Syracuse University. Incredibly articulate and thoughtful, her series, The Photographer's Wife, are a series of portraits of herself in a performance of sorts as Heyman takes on the role of a photographer's muse. However, never portraying exploitive or romantic expressions, Heyman normalizes what it means to be a photographer's wife. Heyman doesn't have a website portfolio yet so I'm glad to have this chance to share her work with you all.

Nymphoto: Tell us a little about yourself?

Laura Heyman: I was born in New Jersey, one of six children. My mother was an English teacher who eventually opened an antique shop, and my father is a lawyer. I studied photography at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. At the same time I was a founding member of the cooperative gallery Vox Populi. This created a dual interest in photography and curatorial work. When I moved to San Francisco, after graduating from college, the first thing I did was open a gallery.

LH: My oldest sister took a photography class in high school. I would have been in sixth grade. She often asked me to pose for her. The poses weren’t what I was used to from our family portraits at Christmas - they were a little looser. She would photograph my sisters and I in the landscape, just standing still. She never asked us to smile. The day she brought home the black and white prints from our sessions I was hooked. I took photography in high school, and then received my B.F.A from University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and my M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

LH: Pretty much anywhere: art, books, movies, people, places. Sometimes a simple gesture exchanged between two people I see on the subway will give me an idea I’ll work on for months. I often travel for work, and being in unfamiliar cities and landscapes also opens things up, lets me to see things from a different perspective.

LH: With some projects, the process is very simple - there’s something happening that I feel should be recorded, as in the case of The Last Party, which documents the final days of Ocho Loco, a warehouse I occupied in San Francisco from 1990 – 2003. By the time we received an eviction notice in 2003, Ocho Loco was one of the few artist warehouses still in operation in San Francisco proper; most others had either been turned into live-work lofts, or moved to the outskirts of the city where rent was cheaper. For our final event at the space, all of the bands that had ever played there were invited back for one last show, which would last almost 24 hours. I drank a lot of coffee and photographed the party from beginning to end.

With other projects, the process is a little more complicated - it may start with a question, something I’ve been turning over in my head for a while. The Photographer’s Wife was partially influenced by a story a friend told me about the wife of a well-known photographer in San Francisco. In college, I had seen the requisite images of Eleanor Callahan, Edith Gowan and Bebe Nixon that were part of any photography student’s education. I was always fascinated by those women, and wondered about their lives, and what they thought about the images we’re all so familiar with. Now I had received some sort of inside information on what it was like to be a strong intelligent woman involved in the process in a very direct way, but without any of the rewards that artists normally expect or receive. I realized these women weren’t the romantic figures I had imagined them to be when I was younger, but they weren’t tragic or exploited either. I had been making some images of myself, not self-portraits, more like performance stills, and hearing this personal story made me view those images differently.

This led to a series of images that presented a female subject gazing intimately at the camera, suggesting that an artist making images of his lover. Because I was playing both roles at once, it created a fictionalized photographer as well as a fictionalized subject. The model/subject’s job is always performative — she must be able to portray not only a true self, but also an idealized version. Here, I was conveying not only this multiple subjectivity, but also reflecting back to the viewer an imagined photographer husband. The images examine the disparity between the sexes in the history of art and portraiture, excavating it to uncover not only the discouraging actualities of gender disparity, but also the magic that might occur when these different possibilities interact in some way.

Curatorial projects function in much the same way – some look at a specific type of technical or conceptual practice, for instance, an idea or way of working I might see happening on the East and West Coast at the same time, as with the exhibition Flipping the Bird, which was exhibited at Vox Populi gallery in Philadelphia in 2003. Sometimes it’s more specific and directed, as with Who’s Afraid of America, which opened at Wonderland Art Space in Copenhagen in November 2008. That exhibition examined American documentary photography and the way it often positions both itself and its subjects as outside of societal norms. The photographers included in that exhibition were Justyna Badach, Larry Clark, Cheryl Dunn, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Zoe Strauss and Tobin Yelland.

LH: Right now I’m working continuing work on The Photographer’s Wife, which will eventually be a book.

I’m also researching a project about the Venice Biennale and its relation to the current boom in cultural tourism, which has generated its own micro-model of capitalism (i.e., a relatively small and wealthy group at the top of the system, with the number of individuals expanding and remuneration shrinking as you move down the pyramid). At this point there are over 200 international biennials in the world. As they continue to proliferate I want to look at the circuit of cultural tourism they create, how it functions, and what purpose it serves.

I chose the Venice Biennale as the subject for this research because it’s both the first and currently the largest biennial in the world. It also has a huge influence on the value of an artists work, and this influence is felt throughout all of the smaller art fairs and biennials.

I’ve just been in Venice documenting some of the individuals involved in running and servicing this year’s Biennale. I’ll use these images to apply for funding to complete the project at the next Biennale in 2011.

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NYMPHOTOis a collective of women in photography dedicated to creating a community of and for female artists & art administrators, in order to span the gender divide that pervades throughout the art world today. Our primary concern is to increase the exposure of our & other female photographers and the work they create. The collective is a fusion of industries: the scholastic, the representative and the museum.Find out more here: WWW.NYMPHOTO.COM